PMG Brain Room – 3 Easy Cheats To Ensure YouTube Success

Everyone in digital is talking video and the reason for that is simple – potential and existing customers are engaging. There are over 2 billion videos viewed per day just on YouTube alone. Conversely, the amount of content is growing at amazing rates as well. With over 100 hours of video being uploaded on Youtube per minute, how do brands make their content stand out? Brands are spending millions to create beautiful and engaging videos and the mediums on which to promote said videos are growing exponentially, but how do brand’s promote such content to drive traffic (and maybe a few conversions) without spending a quarter’s worth of budget? These questions cause quite a conundrum, but conveniently, we have three cost efficient and quick-to-implement tips to help the situation.

YouTube In-Search

With all of the time and effort brands place on video content development, wouldn’t it be beneficial for brand enthusiasts to easily find that content on YouTube? Also, brands go through painstaking efforts to control their image so wouldn’t they also want to have control over what shows for their brand name, or misspells of that name, in the YouTube search results? Well, here is the good news — they can do both of those things at very low costs ($0.07 – $0.20 CPCs) by incorporating Google’s In-Search keyword coverage through Google AdWords into their YouTube mix. These keywords can be set up in the Video Campaign portion of the Google AdWords interface and, just like with Paid Search on the Google Search Engine, will show associated ads and video content when a YouTube user searches for those keywords in YouTube search. For additional scale (and cost) brands can expand their keyword set to match to other relevant content throughout YouTube with this product as well.

Call-To-Action Overlays

Let’s talk freebies. One of the best ways to drive added engagement with a brand is to run Call-To-Action Overlays on YouTube videos. These are basically Paid Search Ads (text ads) which lay on top of YouTube videos to drive already brand-engaged viewers back to any chosen page on a website. CTA Overlays are set up directly through the YouTube user interface which also provides reporting on performance and allows appending to ads URLs for conversion tracking. Not only will CTAs drive visits to a brand’s website (for free!) but they may also have the added benefit of additional conversions.

Custom Annotations

Another free and easy way to enrich the video experience and potentially drive new conversions is by adding information, interactivity, and engagement to a brand’s video with YouTube Custom Annotations. Custom Annotations are added text, links, or hotspots embedded on videos with which viewers can interact. For retail specifically, brands can take images and product page URLs from their sites and add them into any section of the YouTube video where those products are featured. When the image shows, the viewer can click the image and is then taken to the product page for immediate purchase. Annotation usage is endless though and, with enough creativity, can be used for any industry to achieve most KPIs. Not only are Annotations free to use, they increase click traffic to sites and conversions pretty quickly in YouTube campaigns, and they even stay in place when the video is pulled into other channels via the Google Display Network, etcetera.

While there are thousands of ways to improve traffic to and viewer-ship of YouTube videos, these three easy-to-set-up and cost effective tips will make an immediate positive impact on YouTube campaigns without a subsequent impact on brand budgets.